HIV, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, is such a hardy pathogen that the concept of curing a poor sod unlucky enough to have contracted it is nigh unheard of among doctors. They mostly talk about prevention, treatment, and ultimately palliative care to ease the suffering of the almost invariably doomed folks. All that can change though (well of course any thing can change, change is the only true constant after all, but now there’s an actual visible hope) as Berlin-Based hematologist Gero Huetter claimed Thursday that he has cured an HIV infection of a 42-year-old man by means of a transplant of the bone-marrow. His peers in the medical world were excited yet prudently skeptical as is their lot.

The patient is a citizen of the United States (still) living in Germany. The fellow was suffering from advanced leukemia and HIV two years ago (what a beastly two-pack, poor bugger) when the good Herr Doktor Huetter treated his cancer with a bone-marrow transplant at Berlin’s Charité hospital. As an afterthought experiment, the good doktor had the (as it later appeared quite seriously) brilliant idea of using the bone marrow of a donor who was naturally resistant to HIV. By the by, statistics show that 1% Europeans at most carry the genetic mutation that makes them impervious to this modern plague. HIV attacks bone-marrow cells which produce immune system cells, hence the disease caused by HIV is called Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome – AIDS for short, though I’ve never heard of it really aiding anyone. The good doktor’s hypothesis then, was that putting HIV-resistant marrow in the HIV-harrowed fellow should help his health. Huetter was right. Twenty months after the transplant, not the most infinitesimal trace of the bothersome bug  was to be found in the patient. As two-packs go, this one was a better deal.

Now is this a workable AIDS cure? ‘Fraid not old bean, Huetter himself says that bone-marrow transplants, which by the way have the nasty side-effect of killing about a third of patients, are too dangerous to be justified ethically for any other situation except late-stage leukemia or something equally desperate.

They also don’t know if Huetter’s man is really cured. HIV has the knack to hide in very hard-to-detect areas like the brain, or worse rectal tissue (oh my!). Antiviral drugs today can reduce the “viral load” to the point where the bug is undetectable in the bloodstream, but take the patient off the drug and it comes back.

Doktor Huetter’s patient has not received these antivirals for two years and there’s not a trace of virus in him, not even in the usual hiding spots. Understandably, researchers are staying skeptical about the thoroughness of the tests, believing that "A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it's not present." As Dr. Andrew Badley of the Mayo Clinic’s HIV and immunology research lab put it.

Disbelief aside, if the transplant really has been a success, and if it can be replicated, gene therapists may one day re-engineer a patient’s cells to evolve the same resistance mutation without the need for a surgical transplant. Ade Fakoya, a Londoner, clinician and senior advisor to the nonprofit Aids Alliance posits the glum perspective that such a treatment, if possible at all, would be “decades rather than years away,” and at any rate too expensive for developing countries. For the uninitiated – that’s where HIV is the most widespread. Proponents of gene therapy say it could, in the future, be done cheaply by means of an injection, much like vaccines are done today.